#decimals — Public Fediverse posts

Gather 'round, nerds! 🧐 Ever wondered how much mind-numbing #precision you can squeeze from snooze-inducing tables? Spoiler: it's like trying to extract a plot from a Michael Bay film—pointless but oddly mesmerizing. Dive deep into this riveting saga of digits and #decimals, where #boredom meets pretentiousness in a death match. 📉🤦‍♂️
https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/03/26/table-precision/ #nerd #culture #data #analysis #HackerNews #ngated

Counting on the wisdom of the crowd. If I give you numbers like these:

638129013803990047
637147682785557162
636790199355386290
637171340797037368

Do they ring any bell? Like an exotic timestamp? Or something that anyone has seen so far?

I appreciate shareing to reach as many people as possible and acquire potential responses.

#infosec #askfedi #computerscience #decimals #binarydata #wisdomofthecrowd

On the first use of decimal points: https://www.npr.org/2024/02/24/1233702474/the-decimal-point-was-in-use-150-years-before-previously-thought-research-shows

My discomfort with the decimal / base 10 system is...it's too popular. For too many people, it's our only conceptual way of understanding real numbers.

I remember taking real analysis as an undergrad, and not really getting it. It took me years until I could pry my brain away from conceiving of real numbers as something different from their representation as decimal expansions.

For example, people say π "is" 3.14159...and that it "goes on forever". Well, no: the sequence of symbols that starts with 3.14159 is one way of *representing* π, and it's only that representation that goes on forever; as a number, π is, well: π.

If I ever get the chance to teach undergrad real analysis, I want to focus the course on showing students just what the real numbers (and functions thereof) *are*, and how unspeakably strange they are.

#math #realanalysis #decimals